iPhone widens edge over BlackBerry in JD Power rankings

updated 11:10 am EDT, Thu April 1, 2010

by MacNN Staff

BlackBerry loses ground in JD Power without touch

Apple's lead in smartphone customer satisfaction has only grown in the past few months, JD Power discovered in its latest Smartphone Customer Satisfaction study. The iPhone's score has remained unchanged since October and at 810 points retains the absolute lead in satisfaction scores for both all phones and smartphones. The second-place BlackBerry has dropped down to 741 and now sits below the average of 753.

Others have climbed up slightly but still fare worse. HTC's further move from Windows Mobile to Android helped raise its score to 727, while Nokia and Palm managed slight improvements at 720 and 712 respectively.

Analysts found that the score depended in large part on whether or not the phone had a touchscreen. The average score for phones that did was significantly higher, at 771. Just over half of smartphones covered in the study had the feature, and it also played into the factors that influenced readers. Ease of use was the most often cited factor at 26 percent, along with the OS (24 percent) and physical design (23 percent).

Touchscreens were also an important part of the Traditional Phone study, but the limited feature sets of the devices pulled their scores down overall. LG topped the charts at just 729 while only Sanyo and Samsung joined it at or above the average, at scores of 712 and 703.

GPS was one of the most desired features on phones across both groups, peaking at 35 percent on feature phones where it's less common. Apps also played a role as 60 percent of both smartphone and regular phone owners have bought games, 46 percent navigation or travel apps, 31 percent utility apps and 26 percent business tools.

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TOTAL_COMMENTS Comments

I took the numbers listed in that graph of theirs and plugged them into Numbers (seemed appropriate) to check their facts.

My average (and no, I didn't accidentally add in their average as its own number) came out as 739, putting Blackberry/RIM a few points ABOVE the average, not below.

Maybe there are other devices that aren't listed here? I would assume any others would be left off because they were below these which would bring the average down and not up to their listed 753 number.

I also don't get the use of the dot rating. It puts Apple as the only one with five dots listing it "Among the best" when based on their data it is "among" nothing else.

I may be a die-hard Apple fanboy and (sometimes) apologist, but I despise bad math and/or data manipulation.

For a (relative) freshman in the phone industry, Apple doesn't facts skewed and can easily handle a competitor sharing the "Among the best" spotlight.

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